Final Fantasy VII Rebirth: Ending Thoughts

This writing will contain spoilers from Final Fantasy VII OG (PS1), Final Fantasy VII Remake and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth! Proceed at your own risk. Spoilers begin right after the nice picture of Aerith below letting you jump out if you came here by accident and haven't finished the game.

Nothing changed. Everything changed.

Aerith still dies. Aerith lives. What happened?

It was all confusing for a moment, and people can be forgiven for thinking that this is Square Enix's attempt of appeasing both sides of the fandom: the side that wanted nothing changed from the original and the other side that wanted fate to be changed in Aerith's favor.

First, take a look at this Rebirth Ending Infographic^•1 (thanks, Alex!). It explained so many things that happened during the finale sequence that you might have missed. For example: I noticed that the Stamp was different in the Zack and Biggs scene because they shoved it front and center on our faces, but I didn't realize that there were three different Zack timelines with different Stamp designs. There are admittedly some in theorycrafting in here but it's a good starting point for our discussion, so let's start here with some questions that I have about this ending.

During the scene with three Zack timelines where he was making a decision whether to save Biggs, save Cloud or save Aerith, it can be assumed that the three timelines are going at the same pace. Meaning no timeline is ahead or behind of the others. All the events from Remake still happened in all the shown timelines, up until the end of it, where apparently the Remake party lost the final battle and got severely injured in all other timelines except the only one where the party successfully defied fate and went into Rebirth (so can we also surmise there was only one exact timeline where Rebirth happened when it began?)

But if this is the case, then it brings into question: who was the Aerith that showed up in the doomed timeline (the one that gave him Holy) and later fought beside Cloud in the final phase against Sephiroth?

If she is the Ultimate/OG Aerith, it means that her timeline is ahead of the others as this Aerith is seemingly aware of the future and has her memories intact (as shown by her having the full Holy materia before giving it to Cloud). Or maybe it's simply that by being in the Lifestream she is beyond all constraints of time and space, she is now Schrodinger's Aerith and she is able to help Cloud to stop Sephiroth as she needs to.

(As long as Sephiroth doesn't kill her again? Is it possible for Sephiroth to actually find and kill this Aerith? Events in the doomed timeline seemed to imply so).

I began thinking about this when Zack was having a conversation with Biggs about Cloud and then realizing they were talking about different Clouds. Zack was talking about comatose Cloud while Biggs was talking about Ex-SOLDIER Cloud. The two never actually met each other but thinking about the timeline pace thing, when the bombing mission happened with Ex-SOLDIER Cloud, there is actually a coma Cloud there with Zack at the same time.

There should have been a roughly 3 months gap^•2 between the end of Crisis Core to the start of Final Fantasy VII but in Remake's ending we saw that those events overlapped and time was warped somehow. Another pressing question is what happened to Ex-SOLDIER Cloud after Zack and Coma Cloud arrived in Midgar? The rest of the party other than Aerith and Cloud are presumed dead or captured while Cloud is said to be on the loose? Did Ex-SOLDIER Cloud just conveniently vanished from the timeline to avoid two Clouds meeting each other?

From the doomed timeline (and also a part of Zack's timeline) we learned that a person's consciousness from another timeline can inhabit that same person's body in another timeline when the body was unconscious. But duplicates, other than using Yuffie's Doppelganger technique, seem unheard of at this point.

If we take what we just discussed as a rule, isn't it strange to realize that the supposed Ultimate/OG Aerith could materialize physically out of nowhere? The fight definitely did not happen inside Cloud or Sephiroth's mind because in all of the stages we've been fighting against a physical manifestation of Sephiroth.

Is this Aerith actually the Aerith that survived into the new timeline that only Cloud can see? There is indeed some logic to that as she is using the same equipment and materia as your party Aerith (instead of Square Enix equipping her with souped up materias if she is the Ultimate Aerith for example) but then the end where she disappeared became harder to explain because Cloud can see her.

There is a theory going around that it was indeed Ultimate Aerith and after she inhabited the Aerith from the doomed timeline, she once again helped you by inhabiting the new timeline Aerith, thus letting this Aerith have future knowledge while also still locking her to party Aerith's power set and equipment. And she "disappeared" at the end of the fight to imply that her consciousness was returning to the Lifestream and her surviving body was returning to the new timeline (whereas Cloud returned to the timeline where Aerith was actually dead).

Possibly (thanks for the discussion, Griff!). If you remember, Cloud was the only one who could "see and speak" to Aerith and Zack in Advent Children. Plus, since we see Aerith and Zack together in the Advent Children ending, it is also a possibility that they will tie up this multiple timeline thing by having Zack ending up on the surviving Aerith's timeline after the events of the Rebirth ending.

I know that in Advent Children it was said that Aerith and Zack helped Cloud from the Lifestream, but it could easily be retconned with them helping out Cloud from another timeline. When I see the scene where Aerith touched Nanaki and he kind of realized her presence, it reminds me of the scene in Advent Children where Aerith gave Cloud an "up" during the battle against Bahamut SIN. And when he was unconscious after the final fight, they can just say Cloud teleported to another timeline for a moment there and "met" Aerith and Zack for a bit until he woke up.

I strongly believe that Aerith and Zack will return as controllable party members in Part 3, especially since the Rebirth ending gave the writers a lot of leeway to just bring in Aerith and Zack whenever they need to, whether for story purposes or just pure fan service. Then we will see how they will lead to Advent Children and whether they will keep or change its story (and make Advent Children Complete Remake?)

I don't have a conclusion right now. Just a lot of questions that probably will remain unanswered until Part 3 comes out. But feel free to discuss them with me in Discord anytime. Hopefully we'll get Part 3 sooner than later with all the answers.